We’ve selected our ten semi-finalists who will be headed to the LAUNCH Scale event next month in San Francisco where the most influential leaders in technology will teach founders how to scale their businesses.

Last year’s event featured tactical talks from Reddit, Twitter, Indiegogo, LinkedIn, Zillow, Yelp, and many more. LAUNCH Scale 2015 is expected to see two times the attendance and content. Thank you to all of the talented startups who competed worldwide, and congratulations to the below companies who will move on to the next phase of SmartCamp 2015.

10. Mexico City – Capptu: A crowdsourced web platform designed to create a community of stock images that allows both amateur and professional photographers to have their photos available for sale in a marketplace where potential buyers can acquire licenses. (http://capptu.com/ | https://twitter.com/capptu)

All ten semi-finalists will be invited back to San Francisco in March 2016 to exhibit in the IBM SmartCamp Pavilion at LAUNCH Festival, the largest startup event in the world with over twenty-thousand attendees. Three will be selected to move on to step four, pitching live at LAUNCH Festival (http://www.smartcamp2015.com/rules/).

Please continue to follow the IBM Global Entrepreneur story on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ibmGE for updates from our ten startups and more news.

This week we wrapped up our local SmartCamp events in some major cities and did we see some talent on the stage pitching! Here’s this week’s round up of innovators.

Congratulations to these great startups for advancing to the next stage of IBM SmartCamp 2015. Stay tuned next week for our final IBM SmartCamp blog post. Thanks to everyone who participated thus far!

Auckland: Eight Wire Limited
Eight Wire’s Conductor is a data integration product that is designed to fix the problems that often derail integration projects. https://www.eight-wire.com/

Austin: The Car Force

The care force connects with 162 million highly sophisticated vehicle computers on the road to the internet and enable franchise dealerships to see service opportunities in real time. www.thecarforce.com

Boston: Feelter
Feelter offers a revolutionary approach to social content harvesting, curation and monetization which can either replace or complement the solutions in the marketplace. www.feelter.com

Berlin: Panatomy and Tripdelta

Panatomy is a breakthrough visual support software for medical imaging specialists, providing the first interactive image-based diagnostic reference system for radiology. www.panatomy.com

Tripdelta is a smart flight search that finds routes and alternative flight options that other flight searches do not find and provides route suggestions. www.tripdelta.com

Cairo: Vidmy and SocialBlink
Vidmy uses Softlayer to manage a site that allows you to choose videos from around the Internet to build a custom video website and make money from Advertisements. http://www.vidmy.com/
SocialBlink analyzes information and sentiments in Arabic and English on social media channels including: Facebook, Twitter & YouTube. http://www.social-blink.com/

Milan: Horus Technology
Horus is a wearable personal assistant for blind and visually impaired people. Worn on the user’s head, it observes the scene through a vision system and describes it to the user through a bone conduction device. It can read texts, recognize people and objects and detect obstacles and road signs. http://horus.tech/it/

Montevideo: Bquate and Tizkka
Bquate created a talent platform for the music and video industries in South America. Their dashboard allows industry professionals to make educated talent decisions based on transparency and real data. www.bquate.com

TiZKKA is the first fashion app that connects users with their favorite fashion bloggers to purchase the same products worn by the fashion bloggers seamlessly in an app. http://www.tizkka.com/

While flying to Dallas, I sat beside a serial entrepreneur! He shared some interesting points with me that were impactful in his quest for entrepreneur success — of which he has had at least 3 successful exits!

Africa is growing in innovation and entrepreneurship! Africa has millions of entrepreneurs who are experts in their own markets and who are now looking to technology to differentiate and compete on the global stage

In order to support the startups and developers in this growing region, has announced a new innovation and collaboration space at iHub – the heart of Nairobi’s tech community.
Tapping expertise from IBM’s existing Innovation Centre and Research Lab in Kenya, the new IBM Innovation Space @ iHubwill be an open working environment for software developers and start-ups designed to foster entrepreneurial business growth and provide open access to IBM’s years of global expertise in technology-based innovation.The space will provide early-stage entrepreneurs and start-ups with access to IBM expertise, education and technology tools – especially in the areas of cloud, Big Data analytics, mobile and security. The IBM Innovation Space @ iHub– the first of its kind in Africa – is set to give a boost to the fast growing tech entrepreneur ecosystem in Kenya and beyond.Located inside iHub building in down-town Nairobi, the Innovation Space will be open to any of iHub’s 17,000 members allowing them to drop in and get insight, advice and training from IBM experts in business and technology. IBM will also conduct monthly workshops and events for developers who will also be able to join the IBM Global Entrepreneur program through which they can qualify for free access to IBM Cloud Services and get credits for IBM’s Bluemix and SoftLayer platforms.
One company set to benefit from the new IBM Innovation Space is Bitsoko – a digital currency start-up funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Bitsoko which has been working out of the iHub for the past 6 months has used IBM’s Bluemix platform to develop a mobile wallet application based on Blockchain technology.
The IBM Innovation Space @ iHub, Nairobi will be open this month and follows in the footsteps of similar spaces in New York, Boston, Uberaba (Brazil), Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Bangalore, New Delhi and Singapore. Nairobi marks the first IBM Innovation Space in Africa with others to follow in the coming months in line with IBM’s investment into innovation ecosystems across the continent.
For more information on iHub, visit:http://www.ihub.co.ke/

Today I am proud to announce the partnership of IBM with the Mayor of London and Gust, on a new digital platform for the ecosystem called TECH.LONDON !!!!

TECH.LONDON is THE digital place for London startups, investors, influencers, and developers to collaborate on innovation and disruption. tech.london

In one place it has:

All London Startups, VCs

News

Events

Meetups

Courses

Jobs

Funding

Open spaces

And more

It’s more than just a portal – it’s a digital community creating a World Class ecosystem that will enable the collaboration and innovation necessary for reinvention of today’s world.

There are 3 reasons why IBM has invested in this London Ecosystem NOW.

First, London is a city of Developers – the new King Makers.

There are over 18M developers worldwide — and a large cluster of them are right here in London. This developer Skill is the key to the kingdom.

Second London is a start up magnet.

With the “startup explosion” of over 140K startups globally, London is in the Startup epicenter and was recently ranked one of the top cities in the WORLD where entrepreneurs want to meet up and #1 in Europe. Did you know 34K digital and tech companies reside in London/

And third, London startups are global – they internationalize at a much faster rate than those around the world. Over 1B pounds of investment goes into London Start-ups!

Tech.London is an essential resource to help connect and continue the strong growth of the London tech scene.

IBM’s investment in Tech.London is twofold:

First, with technology. Tech.London is powered by IBM Cloud – our Bluemix platform that is the fastest growing developer platform in the world.

IBM’s sponsorship of Tech.London goes beyond being built on IBM Bluemix.

Tech.London is powered by the People and so IBM is ensuring the local IBM teams, who just rated IBM as one of their favorite employer in Europe, help to create this community.

With IBMers from South Bank to Level 39 and beyond, we are sharing our best employees to work Shoulder to Shoulder with the London Ecosystem. Knowhow, Kingdon, Monitise, and Push Technology are examples of IBM’s partnership locally.

Examples include:

Hackathons – like the one just last week at Wimbledon where we had teams deliver amazing Innovative solutions around Fan Experience.

Academics – like the partnerships at the Imperial College of London – where we are helping students use Cloud, IOT, and their imaginations to power a balloon to 30 kilometers to read information to have weather become Smarter.

Meetups with the Future of London in diversity. Diverse workteams drive innovation – so we are hosting meetups and events around Coding to help more women and girls select tech as a viable career choice.

Resources – like IBM’s Global Entrepreneur Program that allows new companies to use up to 77K pounds free use of the IBM Cloud but more importantly Free Technical Support and GTM help.

Each of these types of activities will now be easily found by the local community by Tech.London to disrupt the WORLD!

This exciting public/private partnership between IBM, the Mayor of London, Gust and a wide range of local partners puts this powerful digital platform into the hands of the London community for the London community.

Tech.London will be a great value to innovation and disruption creating a launchpad for continued growth here in the capital.

I love this Infographic of the Silicon Valley ranking of cities for entrepreneurship!!!

The top 5 scores were:

Menlo Park,

Mountain View,

Palo Alto,

Sunnyvale,

Redwood City

Did you see that there is a geographic dominance of Northern California? The top 4 Silicon Valley cities in the MIT rankings possess 20 times the average start-up quality as California’s median city!!!! WOW!